FEATURE ARTICLE

November 2004

Coast Guard Expands Joint Anti-Terrorism Training

by Harold Kennedy

The U.S. Coast Guard is preparing to break ground this month on a new $33 million facility that will significantly improve its ability to train military personnel in maritime security tactics.

The training site is located on the waterfront of the Marine Corps’ massive base at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

The Coast Guard in July awarded a $22 million contract to the Roy Anderson Corp. of Gulfport, Miss., to build a headquarters building and a classroom facility for its Special Missions Training Center. It is scheduled for completion in 2006.

Camp Lejeune was chosen as the site for the center because of its easy access to the Atlantic Ocean and the waterside and military facilities already available there.

The Coast Guard established the center in 1998 to train its port-security units to protect U.S. shipping and harbor facilities, particularly those belonging to Navy forces in combat zones around the world. Its role, however, has expanded.

“After 9/11, we were tapped to provide initial, standup training for the maritime security and safety teams,” said Lt. Arthur H. Gomez, the center’s executive officer.

The center teaches crews of Coast Guard cutters to handle small, high-powered boats to chase down and board ships suspected of smuggling drugs, illegal immigrants, terrorists or weapons of mass destruction, he said.

Other military services, in addition, plan to use the center, said Bernie McGowan, a Battelle employee who serves as the facility’s special projects officer.

At the center, the Navy is offering courses for its maritime security forces, and the Marines plan to teach their troops the small-craft aspects of force protection and intercepting enemy watercraft, starting this fall.

The Army and Air Force, which also employ small boats for force protection in some locations near water, also are eyeing the facility, as are other agencies of the Department of Homeland Security, state and local law-enforcement services and even foreign military organizations.

Bringing all of these units together to learn maritime security “is one of the best things that we’ve done for the country,” said Chief Boatswain’s Mate Keith Basilicis, who runs the center’s transportable port-security boat course.

One of the challenges the center is facing, McGowan said, is defining a standard operating procedure for maritime security. “We didn’t have any SOP,” he said. “What I do is write it as they do it.”

At the moment, the center is focusing on training the Coast Guard’s maritime security and safety teams, which are “our version of special ops,” Adm. Thomas H. Collins, Coast Guard commandant, told National Defense. “They have special capabilities that we can apply to enhance the security of this nation.”

The MSSTs are quick-response forces designed to provide waterborne and shore-side antiterrorism protection for strategic shipping, high-interest vessels, and critical infrastructure primarily within the United States. They train to deploy nationwide, via air, ground or sea. One team, based at Galveston, Texas, has sent members to assist peacekeeping operations in Haiti and to provide security for Navy vessels at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Coast Guard plans to establish 13 MSSTs, each with approximately 70 active-duty and 30 Reserve members, at major U.S. ports, Collins said. Eight of the 13 are already fielded. In addition to Galveston, they are located in Chesapeake, Va.; St. Mary’s, Ga.; Seattle, Wash.; Boston, Mass.; New York City, N.Y., and in California, Los Angeles and San Francisco .

One team—to be based in New Orleans—now is training at the center, and four more are scheduled to stand up by year’s end. They will be located in Honolulu, Hawaii; San Diego, Calif.; Anchorage, Alaska, and Miami, Fla.

Courses at the center are designed to transform ordinary “Coasties,” as members of the Coast Guard are called, from workaday jobs, such as electricians and mechanics, into maritime security specialists. Team members receive three to four weeks of training that focuses on such subjects as fast-boat handling, maritime law enforcement and combat firearms.

Students learn to handle over-the-horizon boats and transportable port-security craft. Over-the-horizon-boats are high-speed, “souped-up” versions of standard Coast Guard rigid-hull inflatable boats, equipped with on-board radar and navigational systems that enable them to operate out of sight of the cutters that serve as their mother ships. Their specific assignment is to chase down go-fast speedboats used by smugglers to outrun larger and slower Coast Guard cutters and Navy warships.

Transportable port-security boats are 25-foot Boston Whaler Guardians, which can be deployed by road, on trailers, or by air on C-130 aircraft. Built by Brunswick Corp., of Lake Forest, Ill., they are equipped with twin outboard motors and three mounted machine guns.

“We sent one of our Whalers to New York during 9/11,” Basilicis said. “The Whalers are open boats, and it was miserably cold.”

The Whalers—originally designed in 1958—are being replaced by brand-new 25-foot Defender Class Homeland Security Response boats, which have closed, climate-controlled cabins. The Coast Guard agreed in 2003 to buy up to 700 of them at a potential cost of $145 million.

The response craft, made by Safe Boats International of Port Orchard, Wash., are intended to replace nearly 300 shore-based small craft of various sizes. Like the Whalers, they can be transported in trailers and C-130s. They are capable of speeds in excess of 40 knots, and they have mounts fore and aft for M-60 machine guns.

The boat-handling courses are useful to a variety of military and law-enforcement organizations, Basilicis said. “In today’s world, everybody who runs boats could use this training,” he said.

The courses for port-security units and MSSTs are similar, Basilicis said. They share many of the same instructors, and both focus on “fast-driving and close-quarters operations,” he said. One difference is that the PSUs, which deploy with Navy forces abroad, usually operate under Defense Department rules, and MSSTs usually work under the authority of the captain of the port where they are deployed, usually within the United States.

Crews are taught to move their boats quickly while on patrol and to display their weapons. “You don’t drive these boats like you’re going over to help some stranded recreational boater,” Basilicis said. “You want people to know that you’re fast and well-armed.”

“The public is not used to seeing the Coast Guard in that way,” Basilicis said. “But logic dictates that a terrorist is not going to go toward something that is heavily guarded.”

Students are trained to fire a variety of machine guns, said Chief Gunner’s Mate Patrick Hood. These include the M-60, which dates back to the 1950s, and the newer M-240B. Both fire 7.62 mm rounds. Classes also fire the World War II-era Browning M2 .50 caliber machine gun.

Marksmanship is tougher when firing from a speeding vessel, rather than solid ground, Hood said. “Because of the bounce of the boat, it’s a little more difficult,” he said. “The rougher the sea, the harder it is. You’re moving, and your target may be moving.

“We usually fire a one-bullet splash into the water and then bursts of rounds, using tracers to aim,” Hood said. “It just takes practice.”

Although classes train with 9 mm pistols, 5.56 mm M-16 rifles and 12 gauge shotguns, “that’s not our bread and butter,” he said. “Small-arms training is usually conducted at the unit level.”

Classes fire both lethal and non-lethal rounds, including rubber buckshot for shotguns and fin-stabilized rubber rounds for rifles.

To counter swimmers in the water, students are taught to use the MK3A2 offensive hand grenade. “It contains a half pound of TNT,” Hood said. “The shock wave is what affects the swimmer.

“Our people are taught to get down on both knees, hold the grenade with both hands over the edge of the boat, and drop it,” he noted. “The grenade explodes as the boat moves safely out of range. They do this repeatedly, creating a chain of explosions that will disrupt a wide area.”

The pace of weapons training at the center “is the busiest I’ve seen in 16 years” in the Coast Guard, Hood said. Five more instructors were added for the fall courses, for a total of 12.

The Navy’s maritime-security training resembles the Coast Guard’s, said Bryan Main, chief petty officer in charge of the Lejeune branch of the Navy’s Center for Anti-Terrorism and Navy Security Forces. The service established this center, headquartered at Naval Amphibious Base Little Creek, Va., in June. Its mission is to improve the professional development of the Navy’s security personnel, including those in the new master-at-arms specialty.

“We teach how to look at things tactically,” Main said. “How do you look at a [navigational] chart and spot choke points?

“We teach daytime and nighttime operations,” he said. “Security never sleeps. Our guard has to be up 365 days a year, rain or snow.”

One of the important lessons being taught at Camp Lejeune is the need for “a true in-depth, coordinated defense,” Main said. “Boats, ships, aircraft and land forces all need to talk together for mutual defense. They all need to be aware of what everybody else is doing.”

Physical fitness plays “a huge part” in training at the center, Gomez said. “Being on the water for hours at a time is pretty tough. You have to stay in shape in order to perform the mission adequately.”

The center has seen “pretty significant growth” in staff since it was founded in 1998, Gomez said. “When this unit first came down here, we had six guys,” he said. “When the Marines are on board, we’ll have more than 100. We have 25 new personnel arriving this year.”

The Marines have provided land on the base for the center’s facilities, as well as temporary barracks space. Also, Hood said: “We have access to their firing ranges and other facilities that the Coast Guard doesn’t have.”

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